Contemporary Consumerism Culture Critique

The western developed capitalist country from the producing society into consuming society, consumer culture emerged. The Special consumer culture refers to the cultural consumption, who demonstrates characteristics such as the diversity, splurge, Vulgar, fictitiousness, etc, trying to take consumption as the sole purpose of consumer consumption. Which formed the basis of consumer values, a kind of "I'm spending therefore I am" outlook on life. It has caused people's spirit losing and value alienation while creating the sumptuous times of a material.The famous scholar Baudrillard on contemporary French who attempts to expand Marx's criticism from the production to the consumption field. He takes symbol as foundation set up the symbol political economy system. Announce the alienation state of the contemporary capitalist society by consuming in modern symbol and realize the other dimensions of contemporary capitalist society. But he chooses the symbolic exchange theory to surmount the Marx political economy, which attempts to subvert Historical materialism without any reason, according to the consumer culture is its ontological overlooked production and labor for the existence and development of human society. He doesn't know how to deal with the relationship between Consumption and production, and even he suggests that we can take Consumption replace production. At last he falls into pessimism and technological determinism.This paper tries to analyze the quality of Baudrillard's theory of consumption from the perspective of historical materialism in order to dig out Marxism's practical significance, and make consumer culture eventually return to the people-oriented promoting human development. Promote the development of consumer culture theory research; to realize the reasonable consumption culture in contemporary China.